Reading Comprehension and Retention: Obstacles and Strategies

This report examines the crucial concepts of reading comprehension and retention, emphasizing their significant role in enhancing the quality of learning and boosting academic achievement. It delves into the obstacles students encounter, such as disinterest, decoding difficulties, and memory deficits, and explores how these challenges can hinder learning. The report then presents various strategies to overcome these hurdles, including fostering interest, developing decoding skills, and utilizing appropriate learning materials. The conclusion underscores the importance of these skills for both academic and professional success, highlighting that implementing these strategies can significantly improve the learning process and outcomes. The report aims to provide students with practical methods to improve their reading comprehension and retention, ultimately leading to better academic performance and lifelong learning abilities. The report is contributed by a student to be published on the website Desklib, which provides all the necessary AI based study tools for students.

The concept of
comprehension and
retention

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
This report summarised the about reading comprehensive & retention which helps in
increasing quality of learning and it further beneficial in the academic achievements. In addition,
students have to face various obstacles which affect the comprehensive as well as retention
reading material for students.

Table of Contents
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY.............................................................................................................2
INTRODUCTION...........................................................................................................................1
LITERATURE REVIEW................................................................................................................1
DISCUSSION ................................................................................................................................2
CONCLUSION................................................................................................................................4
REFERENCES................................................................................................................................5

INTRODUCTION
Comprehension is the perceptive and representation of what is read in order to understand
the reading material. Students required this ability to decode what they read and try to build
connection between what they read and what knowledge they already have. After this, they have
to deeply analyse the concept for better understanding (Afolabi and et.al., 2014). Retention is the
concept where to retail something for longer time in context of students, they have to retain their
learning in exam pint of view or for future knowledge. This report cover the various topics such
as evaluate the obstacle pertaining to build comprehensive & retention and its role to improve
quality of learning. It further beneficial in increasing academic achievement.
LITERATURE REVIEW
Role of building comprehension and retention in improving quality of learning and
increase academic achievement of students:
With the help of comprehension students able to enhance their learning various topics
which help them to improve their knowledge & capability. Basically, comprehension play
various role where they increase the enjoyment, effectiveness etc. It is not only beneficial in
academics but it provide various benefits in professional life as well. Such as improve quality of
learning which enhance the individual skills and knowledge (Strategies to increase reading
comprehension, 2018). Some of the comprehension & retaining role is discussed below which
help in increasing academics achievements:
According to Felt 2015, Comprehending and retaining is necessary in developing a skill
in the individual to make critical reader and thinker in their field. In order to improve their skill,
student have to build a strong foundation in reading retention and comprehension. It helps in
addressing the issues regarding reading comprehension and use of reading strategies. With the
help of reading comprehension, readers also able to answer the general question which ask by the
teacher between the process of reading material. Best way to increase understanding as well as
try to remember things is to read loud and teachers have to monitor it.
It helps in promoting cooperative talk because after a reading loud, teachers evaluate that how
much students understand. It also help in understating text structure through reading all the
headings and sub-headings, along with some graph and charts which provide necessary
information (Yeari, 2017).
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Hung and Chen 2018, refer that students can understaffing the reading material through
making annotate texts below the material which make them understand the material when they
go through gain in the future. In order to understand the material, students have to adopt habit of
writing hint between the text. It will also increase their understanding and make them capable to
retain the learnings.
With the help of reading comprehension and retention, students increase their quality of
learnings as well as provide benefits in achieving their academic goals & objectives. Students
can improve their learning by using various strategies which make them capable or competitive.
There are various various way to improve students learning through making connection at
the time of reading material. For example: During the reading process, teachers have to ask
general questions to check the retention of students. Not only for the person which read the
material but also from other students who listen the content (Janfaza, Jelyani and Soori, 2014). It
will increase the concentration power of students and they have to focus on class activity because
they know that teachers can ask question anytime and from everywhere.
Sometimes students face difficulties to understand the concept of reading material so
students have to understand through making connection with characters and build a story to
retain the concept or learning which they get. For example: In the quiz competition, students
have to learn various things and make them all remember. So they can remember all those thinks
through relating with any story or object which remind them easily. It is beneficial in academic
achievements or enhance the quality of learning.
DISCUSSION
Evaluate the obstacles pertaining to building comprehension and retention:
There are various obstacles in front of students at the time of developing comprehension
and retention (Reading Comprehension, 2018). Some of them discussed below:
 Disinterest and boredom: It will cause the students to not pay attention at the time of
1573498268728reading. They just read out the material to finish the task because they
does not have any interest in the subject or content what they read. It happen most of the
time due to lack of interest in the subject such as science, history etc. These subjects are
boring which generate disinterest and become obstacles to build understanding and
retention of the reading materiel.
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 Decoding individual words: It will slow down the reading speed or preventing
comprehension (Kowalski and Taylor, 2017). Sometime, most of the words not
understand by the students so they decode the individual word which take lot of time for
comprehension and retaliation.
 Difficult text: Some students face the difficulty in comprehension or retention due to
difficult words in reading material. It is very frustrating because in order to understand
the text they have to decode the each word and further understand it according to the
sentences. Along with this, individual not understand the vocabulary of that particular
word.
 Oral language deficit: It is related to the poor reading comprehension due to limited
vocabulary or reading fluency will impact the reading and create difficulties in order to
understand the text (Liu, 2015). Accordion to one study, spoken language training will
helps in understanding the language and try to minimise the oral deficit.
 Working memory deficit: It is the common problems which affect the retention of
reading material. Students not able to remember the content for longer period which
affect the academics as well. So it is important for teachers to explain the topic through
making story. It is most common in the school level students but they have to adopt in
collage level as well to make their memory more stronger.
 Visual processing disorder: This disorder will affect the learning because they skip the
words or line at the of reading comprehension and retention. It is not only affect the
comprehension skill, but also impact the maths or science. Students misunderstand the
figures and solve the maths problems and it will provide them wrong answer which affect
the academics and scores.
 Executive Functional Disorder (EFD): Some students have poor execution disorder
where they understand the reading material but enable to execute or express what they
learn from it (Majidi and Aydinlu, 2016). Individual able to understand the
comprehension and retention but when teacher ask them to give assignment on that, then
it will affect them at the time of executing their learning because of this disorder.
 Poor memory skill: It affect the all types of learning including reading comprehension
and retention (Vaughn and et.al., 2015). Most of the students are performing on average
basis who have poor memory which affect their learning regarding comprehensive or
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retention skill. Is the main obstacle which affect the reading comprehension skill and
retention.
Above mention obstacle create difficulty in reading comprehension and retention. So in
order to improve this skills, students have to follows some strategy to improve poor reading
comprehension and retention:
Fun and generate interest: With the help of generating stories, students can learn or
retail the knowledge. As per the research, students can understand or remember more faster when
they learn something through enjoyment. Individual understand the story rather than reading
comprehension.
Decoding skills: Those students face the difficulties, so initially they have to learn
decoding skills which is sufficient to understand and remember the reading material (Ness,
2016). If they enable in decoding then it will affect their reading as well as academic learning.
Appropriate material: Student should have appropriate material so they can improve
their reading comprehension as well as retention. School or collages have to provide appropriate
content as per the requirement of student level. Such as if student in 10th class and but still read
the 11th class reading material. So it will defiantly generate the problem regarding reading
comprehension and retention.
CONCLUSION
From the above discussion it has been concluded that comprehension and retention is
very important for students. Because help them to increase their learning skills and ability to
understand which is beneficial in academics as well as in professional life. There are various
obstacles which affect the students and their learning capability. Those students have this skills
they get benefits through improving their quality of learning. It further beneficial in the academic
achievements for the students. Reading comprehension and retention play very important role in
the students life not only for their academics but also beneficial in their professional life. With
the help of various strategies, students can improve the process of leaning.
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REFERENCES
Books & Journals
Afolabi, M. O. and et.al., 2014. Informed consent comprehension in A frican research
settings. Tropical medicine & international health. 19(6). pp.625-642.
Felt, A. P. And et.al., 2015. April. Improving SSL warnings: Comprehension and adherence.
In Proceedings of the 33rd annual ACM conference on human factors in computing
systems (pp. 2893-2902). ACM.
Hung, I. C. and Chen, N. S., 2018. Embodied interactive video lectures for improving learning
comprehension and retention. Computers & Education. 117. pp.116-131.
Janfaza, A., Jelyani, S. J. and Soori, A., 2014. Impacts of Captioned Movies on Listening
Comprehension. International Journal of Education and Literacy Studies. 2(2). pp.80-
84.
Kowalski, P. and Taylor, A. K., 2017. Reducing students’ misconceptions with refutational
teaching: For long-term retention, comprehension matters. Scholarship of Teaching and
Learning in Psychology. 3(2). p.90.
Liu, Y., 2015. An Empirical Study of Schema Theory and Its Role in Reading
Comprehension. Journal of Language Teaching and Research. 6(6). pp.1349-1356.
Majidi, N. and Aydinlu, N. A., 2016. The effect of contextual visual aids on high school students'
reading comprehension. Theory and Practice in Language Studies. 6(9). pp.1827-1835.
Ness, M. K., 2016. Reading comprehension strategies in secondary content area classrooms:
Teacher use of and attitudes towards reading comprehension instruction. Reading
Horizons: A Journal of Literacy and Language Arts. 49(2). p.5.
Vaughn, S. and et.al., 2015. Improving reading comprehension for high school students with
disabilities: Effects for comprehension and school retention. Exceptional Children.
82(1). pp.117-131.
Yeari, M., 2017. The role of working memory in inference generation during reading
comprehension: Retention,(re) activation, or suppression of verbal
information?. Learning and Individual Differences. 56. pp.1-12.
Online
Reading Comprehension. 2018. [Online]. Available Through:
<https://tigertuesday.com/poor-reading-comprehension/>
Strategies to increase reading comprehension. 2018. [Online]. Available Through:
<https://www.thoughtco.com/reading-comprehension-strategies-7952>
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